Some bits about the ending of Gatchaman Crowds, especially Berg-Katze

October 10, 2013

(There are spoilers here. Also, I ramble.)

I called Berg-Katze a magnificent villain who had
been one step ahead of everyone all the time, so let me explain that.
Berg-Katze said two significant things during its conversations: that
humans would destroy themselves (in a big conflagration) and that what
it was looking for was a suitable source of lots of fuel for this blaze.
Berg-Katze's plan all along was to engineer this.

First, BK got Rui to create GALAX and empower the Hundred. This created
something that BK could take over by impersonating Rui and a source of
disgruntled ex-Crowds users, which BK then recycled into the Neo-Hundred
to cause chaos. This chaos, concentrated into one place by the chase for
the Prime Minister, created a bunch of paniced people. BK then hijacked
the Prime Minister's broadcast and goaded all of these paniced people
into becoming Crowds themselves. Berg-Katze's expected result from
this was increasingly violent chaos as a whole bunch of uncoordinated
people with newly-given powers stampeded back and forth, inevitably made
mistakes about who was a 'bad Crowds' (and defended themselves from
attacks by what they thought were bad Crowds), and so on.

(Psycho-Pass did a very similar take on the panic of crowds towards
the climax of the show.)

At every step of this, Berg-Katze manipulated everyone to create the
conditions for its next step. Nowhere was this clearer than when people
restored trust in GALAX and distributed smartphones to everyone during
the disaster to restore order, only to have Berg-Katze use this to reach
everyone with its corruption of the Prime Minister's message and offer
them the Crowds power. This wasn't an accident; Berg-Katze planned for
this response to the Neo-Hundred. In fact the entire purpose of the
Neo-Hundred and their chaos was to set up this situation.

Since I've seen some confusion about this: Berg-Katze didn't take over
the Prime Minister's body during the broadcast, just the broadcast
signal. We were clearly shown a mismatch between what was happening
in person and what the broadcast showed happening.

Defeating this plan took multiple things and would not have happened
without Hajime's effects on everyone, especially Rui. OD needed to
defeat Berg-Katze to recover Rui's NOTE, but that wasn't enough by
itself; Rui had to reach a point where he would offer the clearly
dangerous power of Crowds to everyone, where he trusted that people's
potential for good would overcome the clear possibility of even more
chaos. It was a brave gamble given that it amounted to pouring more
potential fuel into a burning fire.

(How I regard the 'gamification' of GALAX and its users is sufficiently
complicated that it calls for another entry.)

On OD: I have no idea if he's supposed to be dead or not. On the one
hand he does collapse from his injuries and doesn't appear in the
epilogue. On the other hand, his visible injuries don't appear to be
life threatening, Utsutsu was presumably available for healing, there
are no visible signs of mourning in the epilogue, and other characters
don't appear in the epilogue either. I'd like to convince myself that he
survived but I'm not really able to do so.

Similarly, I have no idea if the fallen Crowds' people from Rui's fight
with Berg-Katze eventually recovered. I'd like to believe they did but I
don't think we have any evidence about it one way or another.